Posts Tagged ‘CUDA Zcash miner’

When it comes to mining ZCash (ZEC) or other Equihash-based crypto coins on Nvidia GPUs for most people it is time for the EWBF ZCash CUDA miner, however it seems that the development of that miner has been abandoned a while ago. There have been a few alternatives available that we have covered with dstm’s ZCash Cuda Miner being a very promising successor. The problem with it was that there were a few key features that were missing up until recently, but that is no longer the case with this miner. So if you were reluctant to give it a try, now you might want to reconsider and test it on your Nvidia mining hardware.

dstm’s ZCash Cuda miner version 0.6 adds failover pool support, one of the features that we wanted to see the most to make this a really good alternative. It is not failover pool support only however, the latest version introduces support for configuration files as well and an option to control mining intensity for the GPUs. There are also a number of other new features added as well as improvements that might be useful for some people, but we can already say that dstm’s ZCash Cuda miner is now the better miner when compared with EWBF ZCash CUDA miner, so if you are still using EWBF’s software you might want to give dstm’s one a go. Do note that dstm’s ZCash Cuda miner should be faster performing in terms of hashrate with the same settings, also there is a 2% developer fee included with this closed source miner.

The dstm’s ZCash Nvidia miner has been available for a while and we’ve been keeping a track, but it was only for Linux operating systems – not anymore. With the latest version 0.5.2 the miner is also released for Windows in a 64-bit binary and not anymore available only for Linux miners. The miner is closed source one and comes with a 2% developer fee included. It support Nvidia-based GPUs with Compute Capability 5.0 or later, meaning it is for Maxwell or the newer Pascal video cards. There is support available for stratum as well as for NiceHash’s extranonce, so it can be used there as well without problems for selling Equihash hashrate.

The dstm’s ZCash Nvidia Miner is supposed to be slightly faster than the popular and widely used EWBF’s CUDA Zcash miner that has not been updated for quite some time, so you might want to give the new miner a try. Our initial tests show a bit better hashrate with the same GPU settings as with the EWBF, though the difference is not huge. Do note that dstm’s miner has its own specifics that you need to get used with such as the use of a separate thread for each GPU and getting 6 separate workers on the pool from one mining rig for example. The interface could also use some improvements and some color coding can further help in readability, but in general it is quite Ok even at the moment. Do note that the 64-bit Windows binary is built with Visual Studio 2015, so if you do not have the Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015 installed you might get an error about a missing DLL.

There is a new miner for Nvidia CUDA GPUs available for mining Zcash (ZEC) promising a slightly faster hashrate than the currently fastest implementation of the NiceHash EQM Zcash NVIDIA miner. The most important thing about this new miner is that it is not limited to only mining on NiceHash, so even with the same speed it is still a nice thing to have as it supports Stratum mining on other mining pools besides NiceHash (it does seem to support NiceHash’s Extranonce Subscribe as well). According to the author of the miner it is designed for Nvidia Pascal GPUs, but should work on older Compute 3.0 or higher Nvidia GPUs with at least 1 GB of video memory. Do note that the miner is not open source and there is only a Windows 64-bit binary release available at the moment, it does not seem to be based on other popular codebase and is not being reported as malicious software by antivirus products. You might still want to have something in mind as the user that posted it on Bitcointalk is a new account and not an established miner developer, even though it seems that the miner does work pretty well.

The EWBF CUDA Zcash Miner has a built-in developer fee that is set at 2%, meaning that every 10 minutes the software will switch to a different pool and mine for the developer some shares and then get back to mining for you. The author of the software claims speeds of about 250 H/s for Nvidia GTX 1070 while the NiceHash EQM miner does currently about 220 H/s on the same GPU. Our quick tests showed a hashrate of about 235-240 H/s average (up to 250 H/s) on stock GTX 1070, so still slightly faster, but not as much as you may want it to… then there is the dev fee as well and it seems that we are seeing somewhat more rejects than, especially when switching to mine for the dev fee. So while this may be an interesting alternative for users willing to mine outside of NiceHash, the actual performance that you may get poolside may not be much different than with what is currently the fastest implementation from NiceHash (taking into account the dev fee and the rejected shares)…

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